FALLS CHURCH, VIRGINIA July 28—A multiracial group of students in the Social Justice Club at J.E.B. Stuart High School are leading a fight to change their school’s shameful racist name. J.E.B. Stuart was a Confederate general who fought and died to preserve slavery. The school mascot was a Confederate cavalryman, a raider, flying a Confederate battle flag. Recognizing the Confederate flag’s offensiveness, school officials shaded out the flag in 2001 so it looks like a solid blue pennant. But everyone knows they simply painted over a flagrant symbol of racism and that the raider was still fighting to preserve slavery. Today’s students have made a video declaring they are not raiders! (http://bit.ly/2aSPchz)
The students have pressed the issue in the school and community, among alumni and at the meetings of the Fairfax County School Board (FCSB). Today, the FCSB voted 10-2, after a year of debate and community meetings including one that involved 150 participants, to establish a working group to study the issue further. The compromise was necessary because there were insufficient votes among FCSB members to agree to a name change now. One student leader declared of this meeting, “There were many supporters, representing alumni, local organizations, and parents. That aspect was wonderful to witness. However, it was a painful meeting in many ways because most of the school board clearly does not feel that changing the name is important.”
The students and their supporters are determined to carry this struggle forward in the coming year.
Members of the Progressive Labor Party have been engaged in school board events and community meetings where they have presented antiracist arguments to change the name, and met with faculty fighters, community residents, and students to build the struggle and link it to the broader fight against racism and capitalism. PLP members also engaged in discussions with older white classmates at the 50th reunion of the Class of 1966, in a challenging but important attempt to win old friends to antiracism. Not all alumni were prepared to bury the school’s racist namesake, but many others wanted to see the name changed and were excited to learn more of the history in order to argue more effectively.
Virginia’s Racist History
The school was opened in 1959 during the Massive Resistance movement in Virginia. Massive Resistance, led by Governor Harry F. Byrd, fought to preserve racial segregation in Virginia schools in defiance of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that mandated desegregation throughout the nation. The all-white FCSB and the superintendent resisted desegregation as long as possible, despite another court decision that hammered Virginia’s refusal to desegregate. Only a handful of Black students were able to enter J.E.B. Stuart High School between 1961 and 1965.
Meanwhile, the school bosses named J.E.B. Stuart High School, the FCSB also renamed Franconia High School for another Confederate general, Robert E. Lee.  These namings are reflective of Fairfax County’s active racist campaign against integration that lasted until 1965.
Confederate Generals Lee and Stuart fought in the U.S. Civil War to preserve the enslavement of four million Black people. Before the Civil War, Stuart served in the U.S. Army and beat and arrested John Brown, a militant fighter against slavery, at Harper’s Ferry. When the Civil War began, Stuart resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and joined the Confederacy in order to fight for the “Virginia way of life”, aka slavery, a system so brutal that many slave-owners calculated they could maximize profits if they worked an adult male slave to death in seven years. During the war, Stuart led a raid into Chestertown, Pennsylvania, where he captured eight free Black workers and re-enslaved them in Virginia.
Racist Symbols Lead to Racist Actions
Confederate flags and symbols of racism are unacceptable. Honoring a racist history promotes racism today. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black people in a church in South Carolina, proudly displayed the Confederate battle flag and other white supremacist imagery on the internet. KKK marches and rallies lead to increased anti-Black and anti-immigrant racist violence. Racist words and symbols encourage racist actions, so fighting to remove racist symbols is part of the broader antiracist and anticapitalist fight. When government agencies insist on honoring the Confederacy, it shows that capitalist governments do not want to end racism. They support racism to help maintain capitalism.
J.E.B. Stuart High School Today
Today, J.E.B. Stuart is the most diverse high school in Fairfax County: 51 percent Latin, 25 white, 10 Black, 14 Asian. Students here are, through their determined advocacy, following the leadership of fighters from such places as Baltimore, Ferguson, and Baton Rouge. They brought the antiracist fight to their school and to the FCSB when they launched a campaign over a year ago to change the name of the school.  Allied alumni in turn gathered nearly 35,000 signatures on an online petition to change the school’s name.
The Struggle Ahead
The key measure of success in this battle, beyond the change in the school’s name itself, is whether the multiracial group of youth leading this fight link racist oppression and ideology to its roots in capitalism. PLP will continue to struggle with them to broaden the fight to include action against police brutality, mass incarceration, and violent white supremacist groups like the Klan and neo-Nazis. Hopefully, this struggle will create lifelong fighters for a society that values equality and not racism. That society will banish the ghosts of a brutal Confederacy to the dustbin of history. Instead, it will honor the antiracists in Virginia who confronted slavery and later Jim Crow segregation, often paying with their lives: Gabriel Prosser, who attempted to lead a revolution against slavery in Richmond in 1800; Nat Turner, who led a major slave rebellion in Southampton in 1831; John Brown and Osbourne Anderson, who led the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859; and E. B. Henderson and Jacob Tinner, who founded the first rural chapter of the NAACP in Falls Church in 1915. It was the courage, conviction, and sacrifice of these unsung heroes that paved the way for today’s struggle. It is the job of members and friends of PLP to enlist a new generation of courageous antiracist fighters!

Comrade Phyllis Scheer died on July 25 peacefully in her sleep near her family in Houston, Texas. She was 86.
Phyllis will long be remembered as an anti-racist fighter who lived all aspects of her life as a communist, reflected in her relations within her family, with all those around her and in her unceasing struggle for a communist world. She was part of the group of men and women who founded the Progressive Labor Party. She remained active in the party throughout her life.
Building the Party
In the 1940s and 1950s, Phyllis was a member of the old Communist Party (CP) and showed her commitment to the working class when, in the early ’50s, she left Brooklyn with her family to settle in Buffalo, N.Y., then the largest manufacturing center in the state. She, along with her husband Morty — who went to work in a factory — became part of the CP’s concentration among industrial workers. There she raised her two sons, Ben and Sammy, and joined working-class struggles in the schools and in the community in which they lived.
Soon it became evident to the group of comrades engaged in this concentration that the old CP was abandoning many revolutionary principles, accommodating itself to capitalism, its electoral circuses and its exploitations. Phyllis joined most of this group in quitting the moribund CP and in 1962 organized the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM).

In Buffalo, Phyllis became part of the fights against the ruling class’s anti-communist attacks, especially in routing the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which was attempting to oust the communists from the factories. She was part of the drive to collect food and clothing for the heroic miners of Hazard, Kentucky, who were on a wildcat strike against the coal barons. By 1965, this group of comrades led like-minded workers and youth to form a new revolutionary party, the Progressive Labor Party, whose founding convention Phyllis attended. The group from Buffalo was a central part of the core of the new PLP.
Phyllis again demonstrated her commitment to building the Party by responding to its aim to build nation-wide by moving with her husband Morty — then a vice-chairperson of PLP—to establish the Party in San Francisco, where it remains today. It was there that Morty suffered two heart attacks and, after having helped organize the Party in the Bay Area, the family returned to Brooklyn and settled in the Flatbush neighborhood. There, Phyllis participated in militant community struggles, including fighting profit-hungry landlords. By now she had also become a teacher and was active in the teachers’ union.
Model of a Family Collective
In September, 1986, the first of a series of tragedies struck Phyllis: her beloved husband Morty suffered a fatal heart attack and died while he was giving a report to a meeting of the Party’s Central Committee. As Phyllis remarked, “Mort was stricken among the people and the Party he loved.”
Phyllis’s and Morty’s apartment had become a setting for young people in and out of the Party, many of whom were teenagers “in rebellion” against their parents.  There they learned from the positive example of the closeness existing between Phyllis’s sons and their parents. Her hospitality made its mark on many visitors, illustrating how a communist family lives out its principles every day.
As her sons grew older and eventually left the home, Phyllis continued her activities in the community and the union. She proudly marched in the May Days organized by the Party in Washington, New York, Boston, Philadelphia and elsewhere.
Then, having survived the sudden death of her husband, two more tragedies struck Phyllis — both her sons, Sammy and Ben, died of heart attacks in their fifties. Not many families could endure such adversity but Phyllis’s strengths won out. With the help of her comrades and her devotion to fighting the evils of capitalism, a life-long struggle, Phyllis continued her life as a communist. She now had two grandchildren and a daughter-in-law in Texas who she visited as often as she could.
Honor Phyllis, Build Communism
In her final years, Phyllis participated in a series of Party study-action groups, lending her experiences to younger people who were influenced to join PLP by the understanding she brought them from her life of struggle. Sometimes she would express to them her feeling that because of her physical inability to join militant actions with them, maybe she should withdraw from the group. But they cried, “No! No! We need you and your insights on how to react to all the ups and downs of political and personal struggle.” She was convinced and remained as long as physically possible.
Phyllis’s ability to interact with the workers and youth around her, as well as within her family, is a lesson of how to influence all those we know to fight for a society in which the working class will rule. Phyllis’s life stands as an outstanding example of why communism will win. We can honor her by building and funding the Party she loved.

The failed Turkish military coup, a doomed attempt to seize state power from President Recip Tayyip Erdogan, represents a win for Russian imperialism, a bitter defeat for U.S. rulers, and another sign of growing instability in the petroleum-rich Middle East.
Erdogan—once hailed as a model “democratic” leader—has jailed more than 10,000 people, including 42 teenaged schoolchildren accused of treason (dailymail.co.uk, 7/25). Thousands of schools and hospitals have been seized; tens of thousands of government workers, teachers, and university deans and professors have been fired. Turkey presents a clear case of rising fascism, a reign of state terror to smash internal factions and terrorize the working class.  
Coming on the heels of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, the turmoil in Turkey is a blow to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the U.S. military hammer in Europe and the Middle East. Turkey fields the second-largest armed forces in NATO—a legacy of the 1950s-era Cold War, when the U.S. needed a bulwark against Soviet influence in the region. Now Turkey stands as a crucial counterweight to Russian client Iran; it borders Iran, Iraq and Syria. Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base is the forward base for U.S. air strikes on the Islamic State (ISIS), the regional imperialists who threaten U.S. control over oil in Iraq. If NATO was the centerpiece of the U.S. rulers’ post-World War II strategy to dominate the globe, Turkey is the linchpin.
As NATO weakens, and Turkey becomes a less reliable U.S. ally, Russia grows that much stronger. These trends reflect sharpening inter-imperialist competition—and a move toward a wider global conflict.
Fethulla Gulen, CIA’s Man in Pennsylvania
Five times between 1960 and 1997, relying on Turkish generals they’d trained, the U.S. bosses backed military coups or open threats of coups to keep a secular, pro-U.S. government in place. When Erdogan came to power in 2003 and installed an Islamic nationalist state, it marked a victory for pro-Russian sections of the Turkish ruling class. The Erdogan government promptly increased trade with Russia and China and limited U.S. use of Incirlik Air Base in the Iraq War.
Shortly after his election as U.S. president in 2008, desperate for allies in the region, Barack Obama “began to court Erdogan, whom he saw as a moderate Muslim democrat who could help him stabilize the Middle East…[but] Erdogan…has been at best a reluctant ally in the fight against ISIS and a supporter of Islamist groups the U.S. opposes, including Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood” (Politico 7/16). Additionally, Erdogan has escalated Turkey’s racist slaughter of Kurdish nationalists, the most effective U.S.-financed force against ISIS in Iraq.
Meanwhile, the U.S. ruling class hedged their bets with a moderate Islamist named Fethulla Gulen, a billionaire imam who supported the 1980 coup that murdered and jailed thousands of workers and students. Gulen moved to Pennsylvania in 1999, an arrangement eased by the former vice-chair of the CIA’s intelligence council (Huffington Post, 7/22). The Gulen religious “movement” opened more than a thousand schools worldwide, from Turkey and Pakistan to the largest chain of charter schools in the U.S. (The Atlantic, 8/12/14). His followers infiltrated Turkey’s judiciary, intelligence services, police and military. In 2013, after a corruption probe by Gulenist judges got too close to Erdogan’s friends, the former allies fell out.
As their relations with Erdogan soured, U.S. capitalists built up the Gulen opposition as a wedge to coerce Turkey to do more to fight ISIS. But once Erdogan blamed Gulen for the failed coup and seized the opportunity to eliminate the Gulenists and other pro-U.S. forces, that strategy now looks like a loser.
Rulers Running Out of Options
In the bloody proxy war in Syria, Turkey initially sided with the U.S., and against Russia and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad regime. But after the U.S. was forced to look to Russia to reverse ISIS territorial gains, the balance shifted. “Moscow is back as a big player in the Middle East, while Washington looks humbled, a shadow of the great power that once dominated events in the region”(The Guardian, 2/13). In June, Erdogan apologized to Russian President Vladimir Putin for downing a Russian warplane last November. Turkey also mended fences with Syria; “Assad the enemy” became “Assad the brother” (sputniknews.com, 7/4). The Russian ruling class sees Turkey making “a general shift toward the East and closer relations with Russia” (Moscow Times, 7/21).
Regardless of who actually orchestrated the failed coup, the result is clear. The U.S. bosses’ base in the Turkish ruling class has been decimated. Their credibility with oppressed workers there is nil. The bosses’ options are steadily narrowing—in Turkey and Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, South America and the South China Sea. At some point, they will have just one option left: World War III. But without Turkey on their side, they are less likely to win it.
Fight Capitalist Dictatorship!
As Erdogan’s ruthless purge unfolded, Obama gave the effective dictator a “‘shout-out’ for his resilience” (New York Times, 7/20). This pathetic capitulation exposed the bosses’ conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia for the empty charades they are. Turkey reminds us that capitalist “democracy” is a velvet glove on the iron fist of capitalist dictatorship—and that the glove can be thrown off very quickly. As Erdogan once said (and as Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump might say, if they were honest), democracy is like a bus ride: Once he got to his stop, he was getting off (Bloomberg News, 7/4/13).  Workers in Turkey have no more “due process” or “constitutional rights” than Philando Castile or Alton Sterling, murdered in cold blood by the kkkops.
But millions of those workers are seeking a way to revolt against the profit system’s brutality. From Baton Rouge to Istanbul, the working class will fight back against the bosses’ exploitation and endless wars for profit. Within that struggle lies our opportunity. Only a united working class—led by the international, revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party—can defeat rising fascism and the capitalist system that breeds it. Join us!

The Republican and Democratic national conventions are designed to build a nationalist, racist consensus around the attacks in store for workers as U.S. capitalism spirals into a deepening crisis. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are two sides of the same ruling-class coin. One spews openly racism to divide the working class; the other makes empty appeals to “racial justice” while trying to hide a four-decade track record of racist, sexist, anti-worker advocacy and political misleadership.              
Republicans Celebrate Racism
The first day of the Republicans’ hate-fest was labeled “Make America Safe Again”—for U.S. capitlists. It featured two hard-line state terrorists: former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, one of several Black speakers who were used to blame Black victims for the atrocities of capitalism. They attacked anti-racist protestors and indicted Black Lives Matter for the shootings of cops by deranged, lone-wolf snipers. They were wildly cheered by the delegates, of whom less than one percent were Black—the lowest share in more than a century (slate.com, 7/19). This convention was a Klan rally with confetti and balloons.
The Republican speakers proudly declared that Blue Lives Matter, when all the data shows that Blue Lives Murder. In 2015, 42 on-duty cops were killed by gunfire—down 14 percent from the year before, and less than one-third the total shot and killed in 1973 (npr.org, 12/29/15). In 2015, U.S. cops shot and killed 990 people. Black people were killed at three times the rate of white people, even after adjusting for local demographics. Although Black men “represent 6 percent of the U.S. population, they made up nearly 40 percent of those who were killed while unarmed” (washingtonpost.com, 1/6). None of these legalized lynchings resulted in a cop convicted for murder or manslaughter (Huffington Post, 1/13).
Cops are the thugs of the billionaires and their politician puppets. Their job is to protect the capitalists’ private property; they have license to kill whomever they please, including 494 white workers last year. Racist police terror is aimed at pacifying the entire working class. All workers share an interest in fighting back against it—and in smashing the capitalist state that breeds it.
Trump ended the Republican proceedings with transparently racist calls for “law and order” and to “make America great again.” Ignoring data that shows that immigrants in general—and the undocumented in particular—have a far lower violent crime rate than U.S. citizens (Wall Street Journal, 7/4/15), he demonized the undocumented as savage criminals: “They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities, with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.”
Trump’s Nazi-style racism—given a megaphone for the past year by the capitalist media—is infectious. Some delegates threw peanuts at a Black CNN camerawoman and yelled, “This is how we feed animals!” A Republican congresswoman was booed when she said she was born in Mexico. At a recent basketball game in Indiana, white high school students held up Trump signs and shouted, “Build that wall!” and “Speak English!” at a heavily Latino crowd (CNN, 3/1).
But anti-immigrant racism is not exclusive to Republicans; Democrat Barack Obama laid the foundation for Trump’s outrageous scapegoating. Since taking office in 2009, Obama has deported more than 2.5 million people, more than any other president in U.S. history, including thousands of women and children feeling capitalist violence in Central America this year. The same racist, sexist administration has oppressed and murdered Muslim workers around the world, from round-the-clock surveillance of mosques to drone assassinations.     
Racism Hurts All Workers
In this time of vile public racism, we need to point out that anti-racist protests around the world, involving hundreds of thousands of people, have been largely multiracial. These demonstrations do not promote individualistic violence (see page 6); they represent essential fightback against the violence of the state. It is now more important than ever to build a mass, multiracial movement against racism.
The nationalist divisiveness fed by the Black Lives Matter leadership weakens our ability to build such a movement. Funded by billionaire ruling-class figures like George Soros, these misleaders are wedded to dead-end, stay-within-the-system solutions. But the contradictions of capitalism cannot be solved by reform. Led by the revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party, the international working class must confront the imperialists’ war plans and fight for communism, a society run by and for workers. The whole damn capitalist system has to go! Power to the working class!
Trump Talks, Clinton Kills
Trump is an obvious target for anti-racists. But he’s got a long way to go before he can match the damage done by the Clintons during Bill Clinton’s presidency alone. On the first of four nights of the Democrats’ lies and hypocrisy, Michelle Obama praised Hillary Clinton for “her lifelong devotion to our nation’s children.” The first lady somehow forgot about the millions of Black and Latin children driven into deep poverty by the Clintons’ racist welfare reform in 1996; Hillary Clinton rounded up votes for the legislation and later called those impoverished families “deadbeats” (The Nation, 3/1). And it must have slipped Obama’s mind that the Clintons left millions of children fatherless when they championed the 1994 crime bill, which led directly to racist mass incarceration. Hillary Clinton cheered the bill on, stoking fears of young Black men as “super-predators.” Of the more than two million workers behind bars today, 40 percent are Black, three times their share of the U.S. population. For imperialist crimes against the working class, Hillary Clinton takes a back seat to no one. As a U.S. senator, defending the interests of her patrons at ExxonMobil and Goldman Sachs, Clinton vigorously supported U. S. slaughters in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Obama’s secretary of state, she devastated millions in Syria, Libya, Haiti, and Honduras. She is an avid supporter of apartheid Israel and its illegal settlements on the West Bank. She wants to escalate the war in Syria by imposing a no-fly zone, which could accelerate a U.S. military clash with Russia.
As Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs said of the Democratic nominee, “Her so-called foreign policy ‘experience’ has been to support every war demanded by the U. S. deep security state run by the military and the CIA” (Counterpunch, 05/3). This is where feminism—reactionary identity politics—leads the working class: to mass murder and the terrorization of working-class women, men and children.  
Third Option: Communist Revolution
What a choice! The open fascist Trump promises to attack and divide workers and fortify the U.S. police state while enriching billionaires like himself. The liberal fascist Clinton is ready to rally workers to fight and die in imperialist wars that will benefit only billionaires, as well.
But there’s another alternative: fighting for workers’ power (see pages 4, 5, 8). Under capitalism, elections hold no future for our class. Electoral politics is an ideological jail—but we can break out! Our option is Progressive Labor Party, a revolutionary communist party that is building a mass workers’ movement to smash the capitalists and their politician stooges. Don’t vote, revolt!